I keep reading about how we treat education a right. I have written about this frustration before, and I'm going to write about again. It has become very clear that we are hostile towards the concept of education as a right.
When most people talk about education as a right, they are talking about forced schooling. Let me say this clearly. Forcing children to go to school and treating education as a right are two very different things. In fact, they are contradictory concepts.
In order to treat education as a right, we have to allow the process to occur with little if any government constraints on the process. Schooling places restrictions on what, when, where, and how an individual is allowed to pursue an education. Most schools are controlled by the government. Those that aren't still embrace the government's model to ensure that their credentials are compatible.
When I talk about educational rights, I am discussing a desire to remove educational constraints. This is very different from the more popular view that we should increase our push of an educationally restrictive schooling system. If we truly want to embrace education as a right, schooling is not the answer. We need to move in the opposite direction. We need to open up education and remove the barriers presented by our schools.
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